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Imagine you are in a meadow on a sunny day. You’re surrounded by sunflowers, wildflowers, and dandelions.
The air is sweet with the smell of blossoms and noisy with buzzing bees. Thousands of them are hard at work. They’re gathering nectar and pollen for the hive. As they go, they spread some of the pollen from plant to plant.
The color and smell of flowers attracts bees and other insects. Pollen is the powdery yellow stuff inside flower blossoms. It holds male reproductive cells. When a bee lands on a flower, pollen sticks to its body. Then it buzzes over to the next flower. There, the pollen sticks to that flower’s female cells. This joining of male and female cells is called fertilization. Without fertilization, new plants or flowers could not grow.
A bee sucks up nectar with its tongue. It takes the nectar back to the hive to be used for making honey. Then it flies right back out again. Honeybees visit 60,000 to 90,000 flowers to get enough nectar to make just a thimbleful of honey. No wonder people say “busy as a bee”!
Shall We Dance?
Honeybees use special “dances” to show other bees the best sources of food. Here are the two most common dances. ▼
The Round Dance
◀ The bee circles first in one direction, then the other. This dance does not show the exact location of the nectar. It just shows that the nectar is close—100 yards away or less.
The Wagging Dance
▲ What if the food source is farther away? Then the bee’s dance turns into a kind of map. The bee dances a half circle in one direction and turns. Then it moves in a straight line while wagging its body. After that the bee dances a half circle in the other direction. So, it’s more or less doing a figure eight. The wagging dance shows both the distance and location of the food source. The direction the bee moves while wagging is the direction where the food is. The directions are based on where the Sun is in the sky.
◀ A bee’s compound eyes give it ultraviolet vision. This lets them see patches, or guides, on flowers. The guides show when there’s a lot of nectar inside the flower.
▲ Bees can’t see the color red, but birds can. So birds, not bees, pollinate red flowers.
▲ Bees pollinate more crops than any other insect does. How many foods would you have to give up if we didn’t have bees? Here are just some of the fruits and vegetables you might miss.
